Compost – Bin or bury?

Preamble

Stuart (from the Gbiota club) asked an interesting question on traditional compost and Gbiota composting.

Simple enough question but raises a whole bunch of issues.

It gets to the very heart of what Gbiota is all about so I need to write an extensive reply.

Let me explain that Gbiota.club is a social site where people can share and discuss information. Normally members would just make a post or comment on an existing post.

However, this is such an important issue that I am writing a comprehensive reply which is too big to go into a social media site so I am just providing a link to the post which I will publish in gbiota.com – the technical site.

Clicking on that link will take you to gbiota.com where, if you like you can read the post then simply click on gbiota.club and go back to where you started.

Back to Basics

Stuart’s question gets to the foundation of what the Gbiota is all about – which is about how to grow gut-brain food so our gut-brain works the way it should.

It is just a sad fact of life that our modern food system is not working the way it should, which means reduced health span (the length of time we are fit and healthy – not the same as life span) and is the underlying cause of the modern epidemic of chronic of non-infectious diseases.

The underlying cause is the wrong fat in the wrong place which raises the question of why our bodies should store fat in the wrong places – or simply, why do we get fat?

The common answer, from both the lay public and experts in the field, would be that we eat too much and that is simply not consistent with the facts.

That raises an even more important question, why is it that people, even experts believe things to be true, even when they are not consistent with glaringly obvious facts.

This is particularly important in this modern information age when we are just saturated with wave after wave of information leading to mental saturation – one of the great hazards of modern life.

Why we believe what we believe

I would refer you to a most interesting book, What the Fact? Finding the truth in all the noise by Professor Seema Yasmin who has a whole string of accolades after her name.

It is a really good read which helps us understand this chaos we call the information age. The key point boils down we tend to believe what the group we associate with believes rather than the facts.

If we are in a group that believes that climate change is a hoax then we will tend to believe climate change is a hoax regardless of the facts and the daily bombardment of floods, drought, and extreme weather which saturate our news will not change that view.

If you live in Russia, where many people believe that Ukraine is likely to daily invade Russia, then that is what you will tend to believe, despite the obvious fact that the Ukrainian army is tin pot in comparison with the Russian army.

If the consensus from the lay public and experts is that we get fat because we consume too many calories then there is great pressure to accept that view, despite being in clear contradiction to hard facts.

So let’s explore why we get fat and perhaps more importantly why we believe that it is just excess calories.

Why we get fat?

Scientists have known for a long time that we have an intelligent control system that regulates our bodies – they even have a name for it ‘homeostasis’.

We can see our head brain working, right now you have two eyes that are recording a picture in each eye which, like in a camera, is upside down.

Your brain is flipping these the right way up and more remarkably converting these into a single three-dimensional image which tells you that the door is farther away from you than the screen. Pretty smart.

How does it do that? Well, I am sorry to disappoint – I have absolutely no idea.

Now this is important, you don’t have to know how something works to know that it happens. More on that later.

Let us look at the argument that we get fat because we eat too much. We eat food, too much food so there is more food in our stomach than what we need so we end up with a fat bum.

I can tell you with confidence that the food in our stomachs does not just flow into our bum, they are the same height and fluids will naturally flow downwards.

If, when we overate we ended up with fat feet I would not have an argument but we end with fat in an area higher than our stomach so something is taking that fat from our stomach and putting it somewhere else.

According to Newton’s first law if you want to make something budge you have to apply a force, so there is some mechanism at work.

Things don’t just happen, there is always a reason, whether we understand that reason or not.

We know what that is, fat goes from our stomach and into the blood and is deposited somewhere else and that is controlled by our intelligent control system.

We know that this control system is made up from our head brain and our gut brain which work together as a single unit.

We know that our gut is a real brain with the trillions of cells communicating with each other to create real intelligence.

 

How does this work?

I am ancient, I was a pioneer in the computer revolution whey before Bill Gates.

I wrote code that solved coupled (actually tripled) non linear partial differential equations. When we wrote code back then we actually had to understand how computers work, which bit of memory was being used. Just to draw a line we had to write in machine code.

It was like working on a vintage car, you had to know how it worked at the very basic level.

So when you ask me how this gut-brain works you may reasonably expect an answer.

Sad to say I have no idea how this gut-brain works at the code level, sorry about that but I can say with total confidence that our gut-brain is deciding where and how much fat we store, it does not just happen.

It may be that our gut-brain sees we are short of food or lacking some critical nutrient and so decides that it needs to send out signals for us to eat more.

It may be that the species of microbes in our gut brain has changed.

But we can say for sure that our gut brain decides where and how much fat we store – even though we have no idea of the code that drives it.

Correlation not cause

If our gut-brain senses a deficiency it sends out signals for us to eat more and then sends out more signals to say where this fat should be stored.

The driving force is our gut-brain. There may be a correlation between how much food we eat and getting fat but eating too much is not the driving force it is an enabling factor.

We can go on a calorie restricted diet which dis-enables our body to put on fat and we can actually lose weight in the short term, but really all we are doing is training our gut brain so that it needs to send out instructions for us to store yet more fat, so we end up fatter than ever.

The punch line

The punch line is that we don’t get fat because we over-eat, we get fat because of a deficiency in our diet so our gut brain is sending out the wrong signals.

This leads to the apparently absurd argument that if we are putting on fat we should eat more not less. But we need to eat food that will feed out gut brain which will then stop sending out signals for us to eat more and so we may end up eating less overall.

Modern food

Our modern food system is often blamed for the epidemic of chronic diseases, and I am certainly not going to leap to their defence of using artificial fats and sugars.

The real issue is the lack of gut-brain food.

The solution – feed your gut brain

OK, you may still be with me but I have not answered the question which is what is gut-brain food and where do we get it?

Oddly enough that is a straightforward question to answer, for some million years, since the very first hominoid appeared on earth we have been eating gut-brain food, plants grown in living soil (full of beneficial microbes) and eaten while fresh (before the microbes die).

It is only in the last fifty years, since we have adopted a diet of highly processed, but infertile food, that we have had a significant problem.

But we cannot simply go back to eating what our ancestors ate, they certainly had plenty of microbes in their food, but some of these were harmful so people died from infectious diseases.

So the challenge is how do we grow food, full of beneficial microbes but without the harmful microbes that make us sick or kill us?

Back to Stuart’s question?

Breeding microbes is easy, we have been doing it for years by composting.

That is important because if we are to survive as a species we have to recycle organic waste.

Hot composting is a sophisticated process that effectively recycles organic waste while killing off most of the pathogens, but it does require careful balancing of ingredients with the right carbon to nitrogen ratio, and turning to ensure adequate air.

The high temperatures, typically well over 60°C kill of the pathogens, but unfortunately our guts do not operate at 60°-plus temperatures so is not ideal for breeding gut biota.

Cold composting typically ends up with a horrible smelly mess, riddled with pathogens so we need a different approach and that is using the creatures that naturally live in the soil.

Worms are highly efficient recyclers but there are numerous other creatures, some like the beetles, saw-bugs, and soldier fly larvae we can see but under a microscope, soil is just teaming with creatures.

This is a different approach than using microbes to process the waste, it is using creatures to consume the waste which they process using the microbes in their guts, similar to the microbes we need in our guts.

Virtually anything organic can be processed by burying in the soil as there will be some creature that will consume the waste. Even wastes like orange peel will be reprocessed by fungi.

This is a much better method for breeding gut biota, the only disadvantage is that it is slower than high-temperature composting but that is not a real issue as the soil above can be used for growing plants to eat.

 

Eco-balance

In the natural environment, there is always a balance, it is the same with our gut. We do not have to eliminate every single pathogen. Most people have the harmful E-Coli in their gut but the numbers are so small it does not matter.

If we can manage the conditions the beneficial microbes will simply out-compete and out-breed the harmful ones.

This is done in the Gbiota system by ensuring there is an adequate food supply and the right moisture conditions which we achieve by a combination of flood and drain and circulation of the soil blood (water plus microbes and nutrients).

Beds or boxes

Decomposition is really best done in Gbiota beds to produce Wickimix which can be used in boxes, my longer term aim is to encourage local growers to set up to produce boxes filled with Wickimix and plants ready to eat on a swap over basis.

But first, we need to build up a user base of home growers who do not have the luxury of gardens and growing experience.

Compost tubes are a ‘hear and now’ technology that anyone, even people living in a flat can use.

I have tried hard to find a way that people living in a flat can recycle their waste but unfortunately, the flies seemed to defeat me until I decided to regenerate an old idea of compost tubes

I now have boxes with compost tubes on my verandah.

I find that my favourite Yoghurt tube makes a tight fit when pushed into the tube so I can just put my household waste directly into the tube and effectively seal with the Yoghurt container.

I have boxes on my veranda and can simply load my waste directly into the compost tube.

I do have a nutrient box containing manure, rock dust, blood-and-bone (excellent for trace minerals), and dolomite (to balance the PH) which I add to the tube to help decomposition.

Of course, I load the boxes with worms when I make the box and they are more than happy to breed away.

Baby greens

Baby greens are particularly effective for flat dwellers as they grow rapidly, are more nutritious, and tasty to eat raw when just picked.

It is actually better to start meals with a starter of freshly picked baby greens (or a baby green shake). This lines the stomach and acts as a damper to the sugar spikes causing the roller coaster sugar spikes in diabetics.

This is easy and cheaper than buying food from the Supermarket.

The big challenge

The big challenge is to get this message out to the wider population. No one can predict the improvement to community health until we actually do it, but this is not some approach that is going to cost thousands of dollars and runs a high risk.

There is always a risk in life, how can we be sure that people are going to put their waste into the compost tube where it is sealed and not just throw it onto the surface of the soil. Hoever the risk is small in comparison to the harm of a non-functional gut-brain and the resultant chronic diseases.

Science with its focus on proof is one of the great tools of our modern society but when there are eight million people a year having a limb amputated from diabetes, and an even bigger number dying from heart attacks it is time to be pragmatic and take action.

I hope you agree with me and will help in getting the message out to the public. You may never know or meet the people who you may save from having a limb amputated but it is not a bad feeling to think that you made that contribution to the community.

Better than wasting your life playing Bingo and waiting to die, that’s why I do this, so join the club.